Advent of Code 2022!

Tomorrow is December 1st, which means that tonight (midnight Eastern American time, 9pm Pacific) is the start of Advent of Code! This is an informal, annual coding contest where you can solve one programming puzzle each day from December 1st up through Christmas on December 25th. The problems generally get more challenging as the month goes on, as you'll start needing to use more advanced data structures and solution techniques.

Last year I did Advent of Code for the first time, writing up all my solutions in Haskell (of course). This year I will be doing the contest again, and this time I plan to create more blog content as I go, rather than doing writeups way after the fact. Of course, I might not be able to do everything every day, but I'll try to keep up!

Here are all the ways I'll be trying to put my solutions out there for you to learn from (and critique!).

Code

I will push all my code to my GitHub repository, on the aoc-2022 branch. So once my solutions are done you'll be able to see them for yourself!

Writeups

I will also attempt to do daily write-ups on the blog, giving a rough descriptive outline of each solution. These won't be as detailed as the write-ups I did in the last month or so, but all the code will be there and I'll describe all the key insights and general solution approach.

Videos

I'll also be recording myself as I solve the problems so you can watch my solution process in real time. I'll post these videos to my YouTube channel. These videos will generally be unedited since I won't have time to go back through everything every day. I also won't be able to do these as much when it gets closer to Christmas as I'll be traveling and away from my recording setup. Some of these videos might have more commentary, some might have less. I haven't decided yet and it will vary from day-to-day.

Streaming

I will not have a regular streaming schedule. As much as possible, I plan to attempt to solve problems as soon as they come out, and the contest rules request that people do not stream solutions until the leaderboard (for the fastest solutions) is filled for that particular problem. This is in order to prevent someone from copying the solution and getting on the leaderboard without effort. (For what it's worth, I doubt I'll actually be fast enough to get on the leaderboard).

If I get behind on my solutions, then it's very possible I'll do some streaming sessions while I catch up. You can follow me on Twitter or on my Twitch stream to know when I'm going live!

Conclusion

I'll try to keep up and solve the problem every day and keep up with content, but life gets busy, so I can't make any guarantees! But hopefully I'll have all the solutions published by the end of the year!

I encourage you to try out the Advent of Code problems for yourself! It's a great tool for learning a new programming language (especially Haskell!).

I'll also be doing a couple newsletter updates over the course of this month, so make sure to subscribe to our mailing list to get those and stay up to date!